Submitted by Josh Jaspers:

Urban fox hunt video was hoax aimed at the media, say film-makers
by Paul Lewis
Guardian.co.uk
6 August 2010

Chris Atkins explains how he hoaxed the press into printing stories about urban fox hunters.

It was the internet video that sparked a media outcry: grainy footage that seemed to show four masked men drugging a fox and later beating it to death with cricket bats in a London park that was posted on YouTube and Facebook earlier this week.

But the Guardian can reveal that the new sport of “urban foxhunting” was an elaborate hoax. The film-makers, Chris Atkins and Johnny Howorth, said no real foxes were harmed in the film, which was intended as a satirical swipe at “media hysteria” over the danger of urban foxes.

Animal rights campaigners had expressed fury over the “bloodthirsty” huntsmen, eliciting the support of MPs on Twitter and prompting an inquiry by the Metropolitan police’s wildlife crime unit.

YouTube and Facebook removed the footage and the controversy was covered in news outlets including the Guardian, the Times, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail. The BBC was also duped, sending a reporter to Victoria Park, Hackney – the supposed scene of the crime. Amid a growing furore, the animal welfare group League Against Cruel Sports launched a campaign against urban foxhunting, while the RSPCA said it was investigating. (more…)

Submitted by Larry Croft:

Reykjavik Mayor gives Rudy Giuliani a run for his money…

Reykjavik mayor opens gay pride festival in drag
BBC News
6 August 2010

The mayor of Reykjavik has dressed up in drag to mark the opening of the Icelandic capital’s gay pride festival.

Jon Gnarr, a top comedian who became mayor in June, appeared on stage on Thursday night in a floral-print dress, blonde wig and bright red lipstick.

“The mayor unfortunately could not attend himself,” he told the crowd.

Mr Gnarr’s Best Party won the council elections after running on a platform that included free towels in swimming pools and a polar bear for the zoo. (more…)

Prank leaves Justin Bieber facing tour of North Korea
by Daniel Emery
BBC News
July 7, 2010

Canadian singer Justin Bieber’s has become the target of a viral campaign to send him to North Korea.

A website polled users as to which country he should tour next, with no restrictions on the nations that could be voted on.

There are now almost half a million votes to send the singer to the secretive communist nation.

The contest, which ends at 0600 on 7 July, saw North Korea move from 24th to 1st place in less than two days.

Many of the votes are thought to originate from imageboard website 4chan, which has built a reputation for triggering online viral campaigns. (more…)

Czech art guerrillas face police investigation over new project
Earth Times News
German Press Agency (DPA)
June 18, 2010

Prague – Czech art pranksters, whose Ztohoven art collective gained international notoriety for implanting images of a fictional atomic blast on live television, face legal action for their latest prank.

Police on Friday launched an investigation into the group’s latest project, during which 12 guerrilla artists lived for months under each other’s identity.

The action aimed to draw the attention to the omnipresent Big-Brother-like control of the public by authorities.

The artists applied for new identity cards with computer-altered photographs that combined features of two members of the group – the man who would use the card and the man in whose name it was issued. (more…)

Submitted by Kate McCamy:

Why Russian Art Group Voina ‘Dicked” a St. Petersburg Bridge
AnimalNewYork.com
June 16, 2010:

… St Petersburg’s renegade art-group of political pranksters – Voina (War) – turned a historic bridge into one giant “Fuck You!” to the Russian federal agencies. Here’s how they pulled it off.

Over the years, Voina staged many actions: police station take-overs, anti-homophobic faux-lynchings in malls, stray cat throwing into swanky restaurants, anti-Medvedev public orgies and all kinds of ruckus. Their most recent target: the headquarters of FSB, the offices of Russia’s KGB incarnate Federal Security Service. Our source: Voina themselves. (more…)

Tobias Wong, Witty Designer and Conceptual Artist, Dies at 35
by William Grimes
June 2, 2010

Tobias Wong, a designer whose outrageous sendups of luxury goods and witty expropriation of work by other designers blurred the line between conceptual art and design, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 35.

The office of the chief medical examiner in Manhattan ruled the death a suicide.

Mr. Wong first came to the attention of the design press in 2001 when he turned a Philippe Starck Bubble Club chair into a lamp, softly glowing from within. Adding spice to the stunt, “This Is a Lamp” was shown the night before the actual Starck chair was presented to the public for the first time.

A provocateur by nature, Mr. Wong operated at the fringes of the traditional design world, creating objects like a stack of 100 $1 bills, bound in peelable glue like a notepad; a gold-plated McDonalds coffee stirrer (a riff on the company’s plastic version that was apparently popular among drug users before being withdrawn); and an engagement ring with the diamond mounted upside down, so that the wearer could use it to scratch graffiti.

“As time went on his work became more and more ironic, sarcastic and pointed,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design. “He had an enfant terrible style of design that was very fresh in New York. Today you see all sorts of people doing conceptual design, but he was one of the first.” (more…)

Update, May 20, 2010: Alleged Yo-Yo Master Strikes Again, written by David Moye for AOL News.

From Funny or Die:

Kenny K-Strass Strasser is a Yo-Yo master who goes on local morning news shows to show off his Yo-Yo master skills. The Morning news hosts have no idea he’s not really a Yo-Yo master at all and that’s when the magic happens.

Yo-Yo Master Pulls Hoax on Morning News Show

Yo-Yo Master Pulls Hoax on Another Morning News Show

Read more about this in the Milwaukee Sentinel

thanks Deb

Internet prankster takes on Costco
By QMI Agency
Toronto Sun
April 28, 2010

If you’re shopping at Costco and you come across a price tag for “Goat Balls,” “Human infant skull replicas,” or “The Gift of the Magi,” your eyes aren’t deceiving you.

They’re the handiwork of Rob Cockerham, a tech support worker in Sacramento, Calif., who has a website and a propensity for pranking.

“I am a Costco member, specializing in purchases of bananas and milk. On a recent visit in search of a quality, yet low-priced tequila, I realized that their on-shelf price tags are rather generic,” wrote Cockerham on his website, Cockeyed.com.

“They are printed without decoration, black on white paper measuring four by seven inches, with a straightforward layout using common fonts. And if I can make it, I can prank it.” So he made a list of all the products he thinks Costco should have, such as a “Vinyl dungeon restraint system,” “Canine/feline pacemaker kits,” and “Bottled vodka in water bottles.” He then set about making and printing the fake price tags, laminating them, and affixing them with magnetic strips. (more…)

Benidorm Bastards is a Belgian TV show where the elderly take revenge by pulling pranks on random people.

Trailer:

From CNET TV:

Top Five Tech Practical Jokes, by Tom Merritt, Executive Editor

Dangerously funny videos created and produced by Rémi Gaillard. The show continues on www.nimportequi.com.

1999/2009 Remi Gaillard

thanks Miso

Jumping the Snark
by Dave Gilson
Mother Jones
November/December 2009

In an age of Yes Men, flash mobs, birthers, and fake pundits, is the prank dead?

What’s a good prank worth? How about $2 billion? That’s how much Dow Chemical’s stock value dipped in just 23 minutes on the morning of December 3, 2004, after its spokesman went on the BBC to announce that the company would make amends for the 1984 Bhopal toxic-gas disaster “simply because it’s the right thing to do.” (Dow had acquired Union Carbide, the original owner of the Bhopal chemical plant, in 1999.) Within the hour, the flack was exposed as one of the Yes Men, a duo that’s spent the past decade perfecting the art of anti-corporate trickery. The feat cemented their reputation as the world’s preeminent political pranksters (a reputation they recently reaffirmed by pranking the US Chamber of Commerce). It also proved that a punch line can occasionally pack a real punch.

The Bhopal stunt kicks off the pair’s new film, The Yes Men Fix the World, the follow-up to their self-titled 2004 movie. But don’t let the puffed-up title fool you into thinking that the Yes Men believe their hijinks are actually making the world a better place. A better title would have been The Prank Is Dead. (more…)

From Scott Beale at LaughingSquid:

The Skydiving Prank — the 8th prank in the 4 year long Prank War between CollegeHumor employees Streeter Seidell and Amir Blumenfeld.

Related links:

The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology
by Julian Dibbell
WIRED
September 21, 2009

In the evening of January 15, 2008, a 31-year-old tech consultant named Gregg Housh sat down at the computer and paid a visit to one of his favorite Web sites, the message board known as 4chan. Like most of the 5.9 million people who visit the site every month, Housh was looking for a few cheap laughs. Filled with hundreds of thousands of brief, anonymous messages and crude graphics uploaded by the site’s mostly male, mostly twentysomething users, 4chan is a fountainhead of twisted, scatological, absurd, and sometimes brilliant low-brow humor. It was the source of the lolcat craze (affixing captions like “I Can Has Cheezburger?” to photos of felines), the rickrolling phenomenon (tricking people into clicking on links to Rick Astley’s ghastly “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video), and other classic time-wasting Internet memes. In short, while there are many online places where you can educate yourself, seek the truth, and contemplate the world’s injustices and strive to right them, 4chan is not one of them.

Yet today, Housh found 4chan grappling with an injustice no Internet-humor fan could ignore. (more…)

Submitted by Eliane Arquin:

The Net’s Most Heinous Hoaxes
by Sarah Jacobsson
PC World

We look at some of the meanest (and a few of the funniest) hoaxes on the Web.

Most online hoaxes are mildly annoying, and a few are hilarious. But propagating a false Amber Alert over Twitter? Plastering an epilepsy forum with flashing images? Not cool. We’ll take a look at some of the Web’s most heinous hoaxes over the years, and sprinkle in a handful of amusing ones.

Twitter/Facebook Amber Alert

The Amber Alert system — a child abduction alert system broadcast over radio, TV, satellite radio and other media whenever a child is abducted — was created after 9-year-old Amber Hagerman was abducted and murdered in Arlington, Texas, in 1996. Recently, some users have also broadcast alerts over text messages and Twitter.

Last July, someone tweeted an Amber Alert for a 3-year-old girl. People responded by spreading the alert as fast and as far as they could. It turned out to be a false alarm. A similar sequence of panicked, rapid-fire tweeting followed another false Amber Alert that occurred in September.

How heinous is this? Though we’re glad that no abduction occurred in either case, there’s a disturbing “cry wolf” aspect to the story — what happens the next time a real Amber Alert goes out? For eroding the value of a potentially vital line of defense against child abduction, this hoax sets the platinum standard for repugnance. (more…)